You probably know all this.
Newton’s third law sets out that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. By this strange device you can now understand, for example, why the Liberal Democrats have promised in their manifesto to plant two billion trees: that will just be to replace the ones they caused to be pulped by blitz-mail-dropping the entire country and the entire population over the last 28 days. Losing electors’ support by pissing them off is a small price to pay, it seems.
But don’t worry, Jo, the same has been happening to me.
I went to Argentina on a research trip for a book I am working on that, ironically (given the revelation) is broadly about conservation. I was away for two weeks, during which time I took a total of six flights, amounting to 34 hours in the air.
When I got back, I had this uneasiness about the heaviness of my footprints on the planet, and started to work out what damage I might have done. This was not so that I could go off and plant a load of trees as a guilt trip (or, worse still, pay someone else to plant them on my conscience’s behalf) but because suddenly, deep down, I felt rather ashamed by it all.
Rightly so, as it happens. It turns out that my own share of those 34 hours in the air needed just over one ton of fossil fuel, (based on a Boeing 777 carrying around 300 people). Furthermore, using one of the many calculator sites for CO2 emissions, I caused somewhere between two and a half and three tons of CO2 emissions to be spluttered out into the atmosphere. Just me. Two and a half tons.
Now, everything is relative, and a non-scientist like me hasn’t got a clue what that ‘two and a half ton’ figure means in isolation from anything else. It might, I supposed, be good, bad or somewhere in between. The boring truth is that, whatever it is, I can’t unlearn it. What I actually managed to cause in my journey was the same level of emissions as the annual output of a person in, say, Lebanon. That’s Lebanon, note, a troubled but relatively advanced economy. I deliberately didn’t compare my output to an agrarian African economy, for example, as I couldn’t, for the simple reason that I had shoved into the atmosphere 30 times the annual CO2 emissions of a Ugandan, or someone from Niger, the very people we are about to lecture about their future use of fossil fuels. Meaning it would take them 30 years to achieve what I had done in a fortnight.
I am sensitive enough to be able to detect a faint tutting noise, and a rolling of the eyes in front of a hundred screens. ‘Oh, spare us’ you are quite understandably saying. ‘We get enough of this stuff from Greta Thunberg’. But may I politely suggest that you are missing my point.
Which is that it’s about mybehaviour, not yours. Until it was all explained to me both individually and volumetrically- i.e in terms of tonnage of fuel and emissions that I could easily envisage, I was able to dance round the pinhead of the argument, as it were, and not worry too much about it all.
So having conclusively proved is that I am NOT one of the good guys, I intend to work my way in 2020 towards being a slightly better one by promising at least to drop the delusions. I haven’t quite had the courage to commit to no flights, (I yet might) but I would like to stop kidding myself that my reasons for not doing so are honest. They aren’t. And I would like to think that within three months I will sell my petrol car and at least buy a hybrid; again, not because I’m clever about the science, but because my excuses for avoiding it are bogus.
But before you unsubscribe to the blog on the basis of not wanting to be lectured by some virtue-signalling convert, I make one more commitment: it’s an adventure, but even I know when to shut up.
At least you won’t get a leaflet in every bloody post.
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